The present financial crisis that has gripped the globe is yet another manifestation of the inevitable process 'creative destruction', to use Schumpeter's famous phrase. Losers, however, are not simply impersonal firms or abstract inefficient technologies. Losers are the people. 'Creative destruction' has meant the unemployment of real workers, the destitution of real communities, devastation of the environment, and disempowerment of the people. The question of an alternative is back on the agenda, and in different shapes and forms, in however confused or muddled a manner, anti-capitalist struggles are being resumed in different parts of the world. These struggles may not produce a remake of the previous century. History does not repeat itself, we are told. But 'history is more imaginative than we are', Marx had said. History certainly has its surprises -- and revolutions by the oppressed and exploited are among them.... Never a narrowly conceived class project, socialism today stands poised, as never before, to be 'the movement of immense majority in the interest of immense majority' as Marx had proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto.

It is, however, important that revolutionaries contextualise a world of future Socialism that will sum up the historical experience of the toiling masses from the days of the Paris Commune through the class struggles in the erstwhile USSR and Maoist China while keeping in mind the claims of the TINA syndrome of the capitalists and all those who had claimed the ‘end of history’.

Prof. Randhir Singh, veteran Marxist teacher who served the academic community at the University of Delhi would provoke us in this direction as he prepares to address the issues related with: